New Regulations Announced by the Ministry of Commerce... Korean Companies in the Crosshairs
The U.S. government has introduced new measures to control the export of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a key component necessary for developing artificial intelligence (AI), to China. Korean companies, which dominate 90% of the global HBM market, are expected to face inevitable impacts.
On the 2nd (local time), the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced the addition of certain HBM products to the list of export-controlled items.
HBM is a high-performance memory created by stacking multiple DRAM chips vertically and is essential for operating AI accelerators.
The Department of Commerce applied the Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR) to this export control. Based on this, even products made outside the U.S. must comply with U.S. export controls if they use U.S.-origin software, equipment, or technology.
The Department of Commerce decided to control products with a "memory bandwidth density," the performance unit of HBM, exceeding 2GB per second per ㎟. It stated that all currently produced HBM stacks exceed this standard.
The current HBM market is dominated by SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, and Micron, so this regulation is expected to negatively affect Korean companies.
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